Sharism has launched, the NanoNote is widely available and the pieces for other copyleft hardware projects are coming together. It is time to take a step back, pause for a minute and look at the road behind us. Not to wonder, but to realise what we have accomplished and what we still want to achieve. This is the first of a serious of posts shedding light on the history and more importantly the vision of Sharism at Work.
Moving through the history of the different personalities in our team, there are countless anecdotes and dreams that played their part. However, there are three things that always come up: security, the drive for freedom and the wish for true innovation.
After having worked in various companies and projects ranging from simple web development to complex, embedded systems all of us realised the great danger for the user’s privacy and security. Do you know what all the chips in your all-you-ever-want phone do? Are you sure that only you can control all data on your devices? Sure, this sounds paranoid, but think about it. Recent developments, such as the “Telekom scandal” in Germany and the IPRED law in Sweden have shown that customer data is not private per se. Play with this scenario a bit longer and you will see that the step to using micro chips to gather information on the individual user is not that big and who can be sure that it hasn’t been taken already? So our answer is: know your device! Only once the user has knowledge of ever piece of technology in his/her hardware and can decide what should or shouldn’t happen, do we regain real privacy and are free again.
Running whatever you want, whenever you want it is of course a huge aspect in freedom. Who is to say that your piece of hardware can only be used for this one particular action? Or what if you wanted to adapt a device to fit your needs? Right now you have almost no chance of getting exactly what you want. There will always be trade offs. We want to create a culture where sharing hardware designs is as common as sharing software. Imagine development kits for handhelds, a beginners kit for mobiles or a book titled “How to build your own toaster”. Why would we not take the liberty to build exactly what ‘we’ want, not what ‘they’ give us? You do it every day already, when you mix and match the software you want, and need, on your computer. Of course hardware is more complex and we don’t want to reinvent everything over and over again.
Inventions and innovation have become so complex that they are almost out of reach for the simple person. Even huge companies struggle to get the basics every now and again. The vast spectrum of products that are almost alike, and yet have different qualities and different values of effectiveness, shows that due to modern culture we reinvent stuff all the time. Looking at new technologies as the prime example. Once a new product is released, the other players on the market try to offer the same or similar functionality, but they have to start all over again. Just think. 5 R&D centers trying to innovate will fight the same problems and the same hurdles to achieve a single goal. Wouldn’t it be just natural if they’d work together? Isn’t the very basis of human interaction collaboration? We are not advocating a single R&D effort but innovation on a whole new level, where knowledge and resources are combined to create true competition on quality rather than just simple features.
To be continued :)
